Hate Inc.: Why Today's Media Makes Us Despise One Another

by Matt Taibbi

The Cronkite editorial sparked a “debate” that continues to the present. On the right, it is said that we should have kept fighting in Vietnam, in spite of those meddling commies in the media. The progressive take is that Cronkite was right, and we should have realized the war wasn’t “winnable” years earlier. Doing so would have saved countless American lives, this thinking goes. These two positions still define the edges of what you might call the “fairway” of American thought. The uglier truth, that we committed genocide on a fairly massive scale across Indochina—ultimately killing at least a million innocent civilians by air in three countries—is pre-excluded from the history of that period. Instead of painful national reconciliation surrounding episodes like Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, the CIA-backed anti-communist massacres in places like Indonesia, or even the more recent horrors in Middle Eastern arenas like Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, we mostly ignore narrative-ruining news about civilian deaths or other outrages. A media that currently applauds itself for calling out the lies of Donald Trump (and they are lies) still uses shameful government-concocted euphemisms like “collateral damage.” Our new “Democracy Dies in Darkness” churlishness has yet to reach the Pentagon, and probably never will.